Montgomery General Hospital in Olney will solicit bids from other hospitals throughout the region in the hopes of forming a merger or partnership.
The hospital will release a Request For Proposal in mid-March, CEO Peter Monge said Thursday, kicking off a search likely to last at least through fall of 2007.
Montgomery General needs a partner because it lacks the capital to make improvements beyond its most recent plan for expansion, Monge said.
The hospital will soon begin construction on a new emergency wing and make all of its patient rooms private, a $30 million investment project that will last through 2009. The facility competes with a large number of hospitals in the greater D.C. area and is at a disadvantage because of its status as an independent hospital, Monge said.
Independent hospitals are a dying breed, according to Karl Thallner, a Philadelphia-based attorney with the firm Reed Smith LLP, which often handles hospital mergers and acquisitions.
“It’s particularly true in urban areas, where there are just too many hospital beds,” Thallner said. “It’s hard to stay alive, so a lot of hospitals often tend to aggregate into a smaller number of large systems.”
Montgomery General’s ideal partner will have expertise in the areas where it plans to grow, such as building its cardiovascular and maternal child programs.
The hospital also wants help moving to an electronic health record system and in recruiting and maintaining employees, spokeswoman Lynne Myers said.
Adventist HealthCare, which has a number of locations throughout Maryland, will be reviewing the RFP when it is released, spokesman Thomas Grant said, adding that Adventist has a lot in common with Montgomery General that would make for a good partnership.
Leslie Weber, senior vice president of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, would not comment specifically on the possibility of a merger but noted that Suburban has partnered with Montgomery General in the past.
“We’ll continue to have conversations about how we can collaborate in the future,” Weber said.
Spokespeople from MedStar Health and Howard County General Hospital declined to comment on whether they’d bid, while Johns Hopkins spokesman Gary Stephens said his organization will not be participating.
